Tag: gaming

I was going to review ARK: Survival Evolved, which is the new survival game involving dinosaurs, still in early access. It looks awesome and I’ve seen some funny playthroughs, but unfortunately on my computer, it plays at 1 frame per second. And this is after it takes half an hour to start up.

I made it to the character creation screen, which is really detailed and gives you quite a lot of freedom with body type and skin color. Unfortunately, if you try to click and drag the character to a different position, it takes a second to respond, and then goes too far, so you go from full frontal view, to a nice view of your character’s scalp, to an up close and personal view of your character’s lovingly crafted crotch folds.

I’m fully aware that my three-year-old laptop is just not powerful enough for this game, but considering that I can run most games, and that this was all the way down to its absolute lowest graphic settings, I feel like maybe their requirements are excessive. Or maybe I just need a new computer.

Still, I’m sad that Maddy Longlegs is never going to see the light of day.

“It was on our feature list until not too long ago, but it’s a question of focus and production,” Therien explained. “So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character. A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes [inaudible]. It would have doubled the work on those things. And I mean it’s something the team really wanted, but we had to make a decision… It’s unfortunate, but it’s a reality of game development.”

So you can’t add a female protagonist because wow, that perky bum is hard to do just right. And the hair! I mean, looking at the vast amount of exposed skin on the male characters, I can see why a female character would be drastically different:

You’d have to cut a boob window into that cloak, for one. They had nine studios working on this game, and that was just for the male characters. Imagine how many more they’d need to add to get some realistic breast physics in there.

You know, I feel like I heard this whole argument recently. When was that? Oh, right.

“Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, because they have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna being angry.”

So what is it that makes men easier to animate? Is it because males are not supposed to be emotional, so you can plaster on an expression of grim determination and be done with it? Is it because it’s a lot easier to reuse the same character design from the last game and not bother thinking up a new one? Or does it just come down to the tired old argument that women don’t play video games and men won’t play games with female protagonists?